e wonder that it deceived the riverman. Listening,
watching O'Mara's slack form even Fat Joe's face burned; even Archie
Wickersham's dared flash in triumph. And Harrigan's went savagely
exultant.

"You talked out loud to me, once," he taunted. "Is it so difficult you
find it now to speak up so I can hear?"

"Would you promise to listen to argument, Harrigan?"

Vilification tore at the other's lips, until friend and enemy marveled
at what Steve took in silence.

"You have begun many things in this counthry," the obscene tirade
ended. "You came out of these woods with rags on your back and started
at bein' a gentleman when we were only bhoys. You've made a gr-reat
success av it with the ladies, we'll gr-rant you that; but you should
have stuck to your soft and lily-white pastime. For when you aimed to
turn this river into a gentleman's proposition you started something
too big for you to finish. I'm taking it off your hands, now. Can't
you even talk back like a man?"

There must be fire starting over in the north-east, Steve meditated
with an irrelevance strange even to himself--and that reference to her
surely was not needed! Yes, there was a smudge of smoke rising behind
Twin-face; people should be more careful whore they dropped matches in
an unseasonably hot spring like this--and Harrigan's sneer for the boy
who had come, wonder-eyed, out of the wilderness and looked upon the
picture-thing in kilted velvet which she had been was certainly
squandered viciousness now. Past and present they trouped before him,
thoughts that spanned years of time and covered leagues of country, yet
long before Harrigan had finished with his question Steve knew how he
was going to answer it. He didn't have to debate that, and
deliberation only gave him the keener joy of anticipation.

All his life opposition had been a familiar of his. Days of hunger he
had known and cold, and nights of black discouragement, but never so
black until now but what he had been able to hold his vision clear.
But that vision was not his any longer to contemplate.

Circumstance had been his handicap; Circumstance he had met and thought
to bend to his will; and yet Circumstance had beaten him; in the end
Custom was laughing in his face. Beside those intangible antagonists
which had been his this personal enemy was only puny, only braggard and
swaggering and cheap. But it was a bone and muscle antagonist; it was
an entity--a thing upon which